[miles]

Hiya

Beautiful creatures!!! I've had a couple of encounters with them. Normally the first thing you see is their fin breaking the surface. You're normally scared silly, thinking GW shark!!! After getting into the boat, you see its a sunfish, then feel pretty stupid!!!

The older fisherman told me that when they see sunfish, you can be sure that bad sea conditions are approaching. Apparently, they seek refuge close to shore just before big seas are coming. Maybe somebody can verify this??

They've also picked up a bad reputation with our commercial fishing guys. By law we're required to have 2 outboard motors on any sea going vessel that operates more than 1nm from shore. The thinking behind this is that if one motor breaks, you can still get back home, albeit very slowly, with the other motor. Most people use two motors of the same kind, so that should BOTH break down, you could possible get one running with spares from the other. Highly improbable that the two will breakdown with the same part failing. Now our commercial fisherman only know one way to ride their boats.......VERY FAST!!!! Since our coastline contains many kelp beds, see peices of kelp afloat is common. HOWEVER, many of these fisherman don't see the Sunfish or mistake them for a peice of kelp. These fish are INCREDIBLY hard and BOTH gearbox's from your outboards WILL be ripped off if you hit one of them at speed!!! Quite a few of my commercial mates had this happen to them. Imagine having 2-3ton of fish on a 28' boat, with 10 crew memebers, in a choppy sea, with BOTH motors minus their gearbox's!!!! Thats why our commercial guys are VERY WARY of Sunfish!!

Regards
miles

ps. check out the inside cover of the latast Hawaii Skindiver magazine. 2nd page has a stunning picture of about 9 sunfish swimming in a school!!

A friendly sunfish comes to say hello to us!!!